Talks by Our Gurus

Anger, Reincarnation, Evolution and Willpower

Anger, Reincarnation, Evolution and Willpower

Satguru Sivaya Subramuniyaswami
, 2000-10-18

Today we include a discussion Gurudeva had with devotees in the Kadavul temple. Gurudeva answers a question about "Exactly how angry is angry?" He talks about how a soul might reincarnate into an animal body, about the evolutionary pattern of younger souls and he offers an interesting perspective on taking vows (vratas) and using your willpower to uphold them.

Unedited Transcript:

Yes, when you have to calm down and cool off. Anger is like temporary insanity. A person doesn't know what he's doing, doesn't know what he's saying and he's sorry for it later and he has to have a cooling off period. That means he's stimulated the chakra, two chakars below the Muladhara and opened that center there, which has to be closed off and that gives him the power to invoke the asuras because he is an asura himself. If he's getting angry and saying things that he has to apologize for later, has to cool off. Just getting a little frustrated that's no big problem.

Yes, a human can take a birth as a cow, for instance if he had a terrific automobile accident, experienced a lot of pain and was dismembered they might come back as a birth of a cow to get the functioning of their astral body, functioning again. And of course school teachers, who beat their kids, come back as a bull and get beaten, without mercy the rest of their lives or vicious parents also. That has happened a lot. Unless they do a prayaschitta to prevent that. That means to mitigate those bad karmas they have by hitting defenseless children.

The soul evolves through learning the lessons of life until he's a sublime peaceful person and he has to learn many, many lessons. Also many, many lessons many, many times the same lesson before he can have enough control over himself to be a benefit to others on the path and that's the evolution of the soul.

Yes, as soon as you make a decision to do something positive, you've also made a decision that you might break that decision and that's where your will power comes in. As soon as you make a promise, you've told yourself I'm making a promise because I might break that promise. So I have to make a promise and that's where your willpower comes in to keep your promises and live up to the highest within you and to keep that willpower going you need to keep performing religious disciplines so that you don't get into the instinctive mind, that just kind of lets down and gets depressed and lives in a negative way. So it all happens inside yourself. So next time you want to get a new habit going, make up your mind that you're going to be challenged by other people, you're going to be challenged by yourself and by your instinctive self to not carry through and with that in mind you'll probably succeed. Don't expect it to be easy.